This week’s WTF goes to a year old report from the Harvard Business School (link) that hashes out the Microsoft vs. Linux/Open Source debate, but from a business/economic factor. It doesn’t say anything novel, but it gets the WTF award for apparently misunderstanding the nature of OSS. It’s really quite simple: OSS stands for community involvement, not market shares. Of course Microsoft will be top dog in market shares because OSS is not about the market. The people who develop Open Source software (especially the GNU folks) don’t use their market shares as the bottom line because for them, it’s about making a piece of software that works and sharing it with the rest of the world. Drop a line at the folks at Debian and ask them if they’re concerned about Microsoft having more of the market share than Linux: they won’t really care. Sure, they’ll say that it’d be nice of more people used Linux, but their argument will be one from a coder’s perspective, not a CEO’s.
No TagsArchive for September, 2006
Wow, it has already been an entire year since i started my Master’s program, and yet it seems like i’ve learned relatively little, yet i’ve learned many things. To keep with this trend, i am attempting to have read 100 books for this calendar year (January through December). i like to add the books that i’m reading to the “Now Reading” list on the left side of the page. Somewhere in that list is a link to my “library” which has all the books that i’ve read since i began keeping track (which was in January). As of today, there are a total of 88 books in there, which means i need 12 more for my target of 100. If you know of a good book (especially if it deals with theology/philosophy), tell me about it so that i can add it to my list. i don’t count reference books (so Wrox’s Web Standards is out, even though i have been using it here and there).
Also, if you notice, i’ve added a few more books today for my classes. Because of that, i have a new list for this quarter:
- Read for Buddhism class:
- Buddhism in Practice by Donald Lopez
- Buddhist Religions by Richard Robinson
- The Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin
- Read for Study of Religion class:
- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim
- The Sacred and Profane by Mircea Eliade
- Globalized Islamby Olivier Roy
- Relating Religion by Jonathan Smith
- A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
- Read for Thesis
- The End of Modernity by Gianni Vattimo
- The Adventure of Difference by Vattimo
- Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition by James K.A. Smith
- Introducing Radical Orthodoxy by James K.A. Smith
- Religion by Vattimo and Jacques Derrida
- Weak Thoughts by Vattimo
- Philosophy and Theology by John Caputo
- The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek
- Dogmatics in Outline by Karl Barth
- How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins
- Read for “fun”
- Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Hegel
- Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? by James K.A. Smith
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treadle by C.S. Lewis
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
- The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant
- Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysicsby Kant
- De Anima by Aristotle
- Categories by Aristotle
- Physics by Aristotle
- Metaphysics by Aristotle
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- Of Grammatology by Derrida
- Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume
- Coding projects
- Update impleri.net
- New face for impleri.net
- Update Zeal for Truth (both forums and frontend)
- New face for ZfT
- Advanced Messages for Categories Hierarchy
- Advanced Logging for CH
- Cash for CH
- Reporting for CH
- Drafts for CH
Yesterday marked the first day of class for this term. In my class last night, we began with discussing “what is religion” (which is a good topic). One of the things we decided on was threefold (and in my terms):
- To locate some kind of absolute, be it God, some Ultimate Reality, etc.
- To draw humans closer to that.
- To answer the “big questions”
Here’s the diatribe: Christendom, in its current state, has completely failed at #2. Most religious practices in Christendom fail to do this consistently because it is more about the actual practice and not the internal state that is supposed to arise because of the practice. In other words, Christendom is more interested in worship (i.e. “going through the motions”) than it is about worship (i.e. a change in self with regards to God).
In another vein, the word “sacred” originally meant “set apart.” But it’s not the kind of “set apart” that seclusion brings. It’s the kind of “set apart” that is temporary. In other words, it is marginality. True religious experiences occur in the margins of “normal society” and that is where the religious community finds its identity. But, this identity does not require the continued marginality, in fact, it excludes it. Take, for instance, Buddhist monks and nuns. These people serve a set, temporary time in a monastary (i.e. marginal community) and then return to “normal society” and their regular activity. Christendom fails at drawing people closer to God because its religious activity is not marginal. It is an expected social event every Sunday (or Saturday for the 7th Day Adventists), not a marginal experience. Now, i am not saying that churches should rid their buildings of “normal” things (such as the video and audio equipment, etc). What i am saying is that there must be some kind of intentionality–”mindfulness” (if you will allow the current Buddhist concept). Without this, Christendom is not a religion, but a cultural phenomena no different than an NFL game.
Technorati Tags: Christendom, culture, marginality, religioni got a new jump drive on Saturday, a Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 — 256Mb. It claimed to be “Linux compatible.” Well, it had a screwed up partition table that made it unreadable in Debian systems. Well, after playing around with QtParted, fdisk, cfdisk, parted, and sfdisk, it now works correctly as a “Linux compatible” drive while still being readable in Windows. Then, because KDE has been giving me problems with mounting the usb drives, i finally edited /etc/fstab for the jump drives.
Also, i am resurrecting a Pentium 150MHz laptop for a friend and have found that Ubuntu Lite has been the best solution. With only 80Mb of RAM and 4.8Gb of hard drive, UL, with iceWM, has been the fatest GUI for the 800×600x8bit display. i am still working on playing with Xorg to display in 16-bit color (and hopefully even 24-bit), but that hasn’t been resolved yet. i put into the PCMCIA socket a USB reader (so that it can use a USB mouse and jump-drive) and a wi-fi card. Ubuntu came with the necessary module (airo) preloaded, so it worked right out of the box, but i’m having problems with the USB card. dmesg and cardctl report that the card isn’t powered on, so i’m hunting down a solution for that one. Also, i haven’t been able to get ALSA working (apparently, Ubuntu lacks alsaconf and module-assistant), so it is currently without sound. Once those problems are resolved, it will be a decent computer, resurrected from the grave, and able to be a stable terminal.
In this article (link), Frederick Meekins criticizes McLaren. Now, once you get through the grammatical mistakes (in case, not encase…), you’ll find a simple argument: McLaren said “Da Vinci Code is no better than Left Behind: they’re both full of errors.” After that McLaren also said that many churches have distorted views of Christianity because of Left Behind and they’re fighting for something that not all Christians would consider to be Christianity. Because of this, the author argues that McLaren is a (nearly heretical) universalist based on what the author believes McLaren is lamenting in Left Behind: the warning against globalisation. Now, i read the McLaren article being referenced here and found no such thing. In fact, McLaren didn’t mention at all what his “beef” with Left Behind was. As this author mentioned, Andrew Jones (Tall Skinny Kiwi) called this author’s critique of McLaren “the worst McLaren slam” and he’s shown again that his critique of McLaren is misguided. This isn’t to say his belief that McLaren is a universalist is incorrect (i think i agree with him on that one), but his argument up to that point and from that point are off base. So, for this week’s WTF? Award goes to Frederick Meekins for bad argument form.
No TagsHmm, well now that summer’s “officially” over and i now have a more set schedule, i’ll be able to spend time on the things that drifted away this summer. i hope to have at least one of my code projects for phpBB2/CH hit beta stage this week. After all of those projects hit the beta stage, i’ll work on updating this site…i have a few ideas i want to try.
i’ll also be finishing the series on epistemology next week (look for part 4 tomorrow and part 5 next week). After epistemology, i want to spend some time on looking at Reformed theology, starting with the “5 solas” and then the 5 parts of the infamous TULIP. Once i’ve looked at Reformed theology, we’ll touch on an tangental subject: eschatology. There, i will discuss different aspects of theology that are important when discussing the “end times” as well as Revelation. After eschatology, i’ll hit another tangent in fundamentalism and orthodoxy. i hope to finish the year with a look at different aspects of “recent” philosophy (primariliy, the last 150 years or so) that should be addressed in Christian theology.
If there is something you think i should discuss that is somewhat related to any of the above topics, email me at christopher@impleri.net with all the sordid details. If there is some other topic that would be interesting to see, let me know as well.
Talk
thainamu
Chris Martin
Wilson, Rick, brad, christopher, brad, christopher, brad, christopher, brad
christopher, Jeffrey Rodriguez
pfunked, christopher, pfunked
Jasen